The Son Of Royal Langbrith. William Dean Howells
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smiled, as if forgiving the slang that might well have offended against the dignity of the fact. He even adopted it. “Not just threw me down, I should say.”
“What happened, then?”
“Nothing. But I was in the mood for making her answer something more than she would answer, and I shouldn’t have left her without, if it hadn’t been for her father coming on the scene. He was an element that I hadn’t counted on, and he made the whole thing luridly impossible. He seemed to cast the malign shadow of his own perdition over her.”
“Good phrase,” Falk murmured.
“Oh, don’t mock me, old fellow!” Langbrith implored. “Of course, his being what he is wouldn’t make me give her up, though I believe it would make her give me up. Poor wretch! You can’t think how amusing he was, with the wild romances he got off to me by the dozen in the two or three minutes we talked together. Do you remember that wonderful liar in one of Thackeray’s stories, or sketches, who says he has just come from the Russian embassy in London, where he had seen a Russian princess knouted by secret orders of the Czar? It was something like that. That fellow must have been an opium-eater, too. One good thing about it,” Langbrith resumed, after a pause not broken by Falk, “my mother thinks the world of Hope. She’s always having her at the house, when she will come. I think she does it because my father was his friend in his better days, and she feels that he would like to have her do it. She is just so loyal to his memory. If she could imagine any wish for him, now, after twenty years, I believe she would want to carry it out, the same as if he were alive.”
Falk still said nothing, and Langbrith broke off to say, “There was something that graveled me last night, a little. I don’t know whether you noticed it.”
“What was it?”
“Well, Dr. Anther’s snubbing way of meeting what I said of that medallion of my father which I suggested for the public library. It embarrassed me before the judge and Dr. Enderby; it made me feel like a fool. He had no business to do it. But, perhaps, he was merely not noticing. All the same, I’m going to do it. I think it’s a shame that in a place which a man has done so much for as my father did for Saxmills there shouldn’t be any public record of him. I’ll do it to show them they ought to have done it themselves, if for nothing else. But I know all this bores you,” Langbrith ended, vexed with his evident failure to interest his friend.
Falk yawned, but he said, with more than the usual scanty kindness he showed for the wounds of Langbrith’s vanity, “No, no, I’m just stupid from last night. One doesn’t have such a good time for nothing.”
“ It was a good time, wasn’t it?” Langbrith gratefully exulted.
Falk said, “ Fine.” He yawned again, and Langbrith lapsed into a smiling muse, in which he was climbing the hill with Hope Hawberk, flattered in the fondness she suffered him to show her, and sweetly contraried by her refusal to say the words which would have sealed the bond between them. Was it, he wondered, with a swelling throat, because she wished to let him feel himself wholly free, in the event of some disgrace or disaster to herself from her father? He would live to prove that he would not be free: that he was hers as she was his, and nothing on earth could part them. That would make right, it would consecrate, all his past lovemaking. Once he would have thought that no harm, if it had come to nothing. But now, in his knowledge of another world, with a different code, it was not to be thought of but as part of a common future for them which it began. He wanted to put the case concretely before Falk, but he could not. He could not generalize, as he would have liked to do, on that difference of code between city and country, with the risk of Falk’s making his abstractions concrete in some such way as only a blow could answer. Falk had his limitations. After all, he was only half an American, and he could only half understand an American’s feelings. He retreated from the temptation, and lost himself in a warm reverie of the future, which he forecast in defiance of every obstacle.
He thought what friends Hope and his mother had always been, and he knew that there could be nothing but glad response in his mother’s heart to the feeling that was in his for Hope. Then he began to think of his mother apart from Hope, and of what she might have been like when she was a girl. She was younger even than Hope when she was married. She had been many more years a widow than a maid; and, in the light of his own love for Hope, he wondered if his mother had ever thought of marrying again. His father had been twice her age when he married her. Langbrith knew this in the casual way in which children know something of their parents’ history, and his father must have been an uncommon man to have won her with that difference of years between them, and to have kept her constant to his memory so many years after his death. After all, how little she had ever said of him! Langbrith romanced her as not being able, from deep feeling, from a grief ever new, to speak of him, and he ached at heart to think how his father’s personality seemed buried in his grave with his body. A tender, chivalrous longing to champion his forgotten father, to rehabilitate this vanished personality, replaced his heartache, and again he was indignant with Dr. Anther for his indifference, his coldness. He said to himself that he must have an explanation from Dr. Anther; he would write to him, and ask just what he meant. Perhaps he meant nothing. But he must be sure. Then he would see that young sculptor, that Italian, and tell him what he wanted; talk it over with him; find if he had any notions of his own.
The train slowed into the North station about five o’clock, just when he knew his mother would be talking with old Norah about the supper, to which, in his absence, she would revert from the late dinner. She would be bidding Norah tell the cook that she did not want anything but a cup of tea and a little milk-toast. Poor old mother! What a savorless, limp life she lived there alone! Yet it could not be otherwise, when he was away. How much she depended upon him! Somehow, he must manage for her to live with Hope and him. She must go out to Paris with them, where they should go after their marriage, and when they came back to Saxmills, where they would always have their summer home, she must be put back mistress in the old house.
XII
The neighbor over the way who saw Anther drop the hitching-weight of his buggy in front of the „ Langbrith house, late in the afternoon of the lengthening April day, decided that Mrs. Langbrith had been overdoing. She watched for him to come out until she could stay no longer at the window without making her own tea late, but she did not see him come out at all.
In fact, it was the doctor who appeared to have been overdoing. He looked so tired to Mrs. Langbrith that she asked him if he would not have a cup of tea. Upon second thought, she asked him if he would not have it with her. Supper would be ready very soon; and, without waiting for a refusal, she went into the kitchen to hurry it, and to have the cook add something to the milk-toast for the man-appetite, to which her hospitality was ministering with more impulsiveness and spontaneity than the wont of village hospitality is.
When they sat down together at the table, he did not eat much, and he talked little; but he seemed to feel gratefully the comfort of the place and presence. She came into authority with him, as a woman does when the man dear to her is depressed. Her affection for him came out in little suggestions and insistencies about the food. Like most physicians, he kept his precepts for himself and his practices for his patients. He now ate rather recklessly, and he preferred the unwholesome things. At first, she had to press him, and then she had to check him. At last she had to say to Norah, who came in with successive plates of the hot cakes which he devoured, “That will do, Norah,’’ and, when he had swept the final batch upon his plate and soaked them in butter and syrup, and then cut their layers into deep vertical sections, and gorged these with a kind of absent gluttony, while she looked on in patient amaze, she rose and led the way from the table into the parlor.
It lay beyond the library and had windows to the north and east. The library was lighted from the east alone, like the dining-room in the wing. The main house was square, and divided by an ample hall from front to back. Beyond the hall, the two drawing-rooms opening from it balanced the parlor and library. There was a fire of logs burning on the parlor hearth, and its glow alone lighted the place when the two came into it. He went first to the window and looked at his horse. When